You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.
Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.
You sure you’re all right? You aren’t out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?
All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.
It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.
Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Eighteen and stupid happens to everyone, I guess. If you survive it, it’s probably half luck, and half having the right people in your life to watch out for you.
In this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power. A small group, helplessly bound together by blood with a shared set of skills and tools for consolidating power and subjugating others.
They had been Vince’s brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn’t drive a man’s family to the earth and expect to live.
The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.
I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it’s your job to stand in the way.
Don’t ever have children, Tyler, unless you’re ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.
It’d be a mistake,” Lee said. “I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.
I wouldn’t underrate the power of regret. It doesn’t feel good… But it’s hard to learn anything important without it.
… people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.
Why is there evil in the world? Because sometimes you just wanna fuckin have it, and you don’t care who gets hurt.
Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night.
Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.
I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.
Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.
He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago.
Why am I not good at anything?””You’re a good dad.””It ain’t rocket science.”No, Vic thought. It was harder.
A thousand prayers every minute everywhere and what does God ever say back? Nothing! Because silence never lies. Silence is God’s final advantage. Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it.
It’s like in the Bible.You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.””What part of the Bible is that from?” Ig asked her. “The Gospel of Keith Richards?
…but God fears woman even more than He fears the devil -and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man…
Kids always think they’re coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they’re coming in at the end.
I’m sorry to bother you,” she whispered. “When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can’t help it.
Because, of course, it wouldn’t do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
He’d possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.
The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkenss instead of water.
I think you must make a few [mistakes]. Of you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.
Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you’re in hell when you don’t give to someone who needs, because you can’t bear to have less.
You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better…
I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there’s really no hope for you.
If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire in your life at all.
I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.
There’s only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn’t get to be the good guy.
To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.
One thing I realize now is that you only advertise your beliefs with a t-shirt if you’re seriously insecure.
Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.
Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn’t say is that voice belongs to HER. There’s only one song to sing these days–Carol’s song–and if you aren’t in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.
Death isn’t the end of your life, you know. Your body is a lock. Death is the key. The key turns… and you’re free. To be anywhere. Everywhere. Two places at once. Nowhere. Part of the background hum of the universe.